John’s Technology Blog

Google’s current translation service has just gone a step further.  Not only can you translate text, or a web page, but now you can translate PDF files that are on the internet.  Simply enter in the URL for the PDF file and google will use it’s PDF->HTML conversion tools to convert the document to an HTML page and then performs the translate.  As with its typical translation service you can highlight translated paragraphs to see what the original text was and fix or correct the translation so that the translation engine can improve itself.

For fun, I thought I would translate my online resume from English to Spanish.  Check it out for yourself at: John Andersen’s Resume in Spanish.

I often let files sit around on servers that contain logs and other automatically updated information. I want to clean these up every once in a while. Linux, of course, offers a great way to do this.

find $directory_to_clean -mtime +$days_old -exec rm {} \;

This bash command will look in the $directory_to_clean location and delete all files that are $days_old old.

If you are paranoid about the command and want to try it out first, use this one:

find $directory_to_clean -mtime +$days_old -exec ls -l {} \;

That command will list all the files instead of delete them.

Many of us have websites that look great on the computer monitor, yet wreak havoc on printers. CSS has a great way to make your content more printer friendly when it is needed.

Take the following CSS code for example:

<style type="text/css">
@media print {
#menubar, #navbar, #searchbar {display: none;}
#wrap, #content, #comments {width: 100%; margin: 0; background: #FFFFFF;}
}
</style>

This code snippet in your page essentially says that when this document is being printed, hide the menubar, the navbar, and the searchbar – they are not needed with the printout.

For the content that we want printed, set the wrap, content, and comments sections to full page width with no background colors.

The page will continue to look great on the computer screen, but now your content prints well from that laser printer!